The present invention relates to an information-link system, an information-link program, and a method of operating the information-link system. More specifically, the invention relates to an information-link system, information-link program, and method of operating the information-link system, that allow a user to easily establish an information link that permits the user to directly access information from a variety of sources desired by the user.
In a society highly oriented toward information, an enormous amount of information is provided via various media and means, including the Internet. A variety of information is now easily obtainable through personal computers, smart phones, and other electronic devices, whereby whenever a user of such devices wants to obtain certain information, the user can easily do that. At the same time, as the amount of data provided by websites has increased, the websites generally include deep hierarchical structures, and their webpages provide many options from which a user must select, which compels a user to make much effort to reach the information that the user wants. Also, even on a website that displays sitemap information and that does not include a deep hierarchical structure, in order for a user to display the exact map information desired, the user must input all the necessary address information, including the names of the prefecture, the city, and so on.
A webpage displayed on the display screen of an electronic device of various types has an address called a uniform resource locator (URL), so that a user who wants information can display the webpage containing to the desired information by inputting the URL into an information device such as a personal computer. However, if a website has a deep hierarchical structure, the webpage located at a lower (deeper) level of the hierarchy tends to have a long URL, which renders the user's input work cumbersome.
Accordingly, in order to allow Internet users to easily access desired information, various search systems have been developed, such as a system that allows users to access information by simply inputting keywords relating to the desired information instead of inputting URLs. However, such search systems involve several problems. For example, in response to a keyword that has been input, the search system almost always provides multiple webpages, and, as a result, the user cannot easily reach the most-appropriate webpage. Or, even if the user successfully reaches the needed webpage, if the Webpage is located lower (deeper) in the hierarchy of a website, the user might need to go through various webpages on the website in order to reach the desired webpage. Therefore, such search systems do not necessarily allow users to directly access the information they want.
The URL is usually formed by a combination of multiple alphanumeric characters, and therefore inputting a long URL might require a user to make much effort and might induce errors in inputting the URL. In order to overcome such a problem, Patent Document 1 discloses methods and systems by which a unique simplified network address is assigned to a URL, so that inputting the simplified network address will generate the URL corresponding to the simplified network address, which permits a user to easily access a desired website. However, this simplified network address has some problems: inasmuch as the simplified network address does not have a fixed format, errors input an address are not easily detected; in addition, a simplified network address cannot be easily identified as such when the address is included in a document.
Patent Document 2 discloses a method for helping an Internet user to access target information without fail. By that method, inputting predetermined numerical data into an information terminal by a user generates the URL desired by the user. This method uses a correspondence table that includes numerical data associated with a URL, so that a user can obtain a desired URL by inputting predetermined numerical data, by which the convenience of the user is enhanced. However, by that method the relationship between the predetermined numerical data and the associated URLs is fixed; Patent Document 2 does not disclose how to issue the predetermined numerical data, how an information provider can associate the numerical data with the URLs, or how the information provider can update the association of the numerical data and the URLs.